Johnson’s popularity in the party and in the country has collapsed
Writing in The Observer on Sunday about Conservative politicians making headlines, Stewart Lee said they were “a child molester, a serial adulterer and compulsive liar, a handsome but morally bankrupt financial whiz-kid, and a bully who sends immigrants to Rwanda.” “That’s less like a government and more like a special team of convicted criminals given their freedom in exchange for accepting an impossible mission behind enemy lines in a 1970s Italian-funded war film.” Imran Ahmad Khan, a Conservative member of parliament, resigned after being convicted of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy, but the real story was that another Tory MP, Crispin Blunt, a former Justice Minister, condemned his conviction as “an international scandal, with dreadful wider implications for millions of LGBT+ Muslims around the world.” The ‘serial adulterer and compulsive liar’ was of course Prime Minister Al ‘Boris’ Johnson, still refusing to deny that he has no more children than the seven he admits to by various mothers. But it was the ‘compulsive liar’ part of the indictment that was getting more attention last week. That really was a legal matter. For more than a year the Conservative government has been haunted by ‘Partygate’, an ongoing scandal about numerous drinks parties at the prime minister’s combination home and office, No. 10 Downing Street, even when the entire country was in Covid lock-down. Revelations about these parties trickled out one by one starting about a year ago, each denied by Johnson both to the public and in parliament (where deliberately lying is a resigning offence). Eventually the police got involved, as these were criminal offences, and the first fines were handed out to Johnson and other senior Conservatives last week. The police are dealing with the offences one at a time, drip-feed, and Johnson is due for up to five more fines.
He is also going to have to brazen it out for lying to parliament, and while the Conservative majority there will save him for the moment, his party has irretrievably lost faith him The ‘handsome but morally bankrupt financial whiz-kid’ is Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister), who was universally seen as Johnson’s chief rival and possible replacement - until he fell from grace a couple of weeks ago. He too has been fined for the parties, but his bigger problem is his personal finances. First it came out that Sunak’s wife, an Indian heiress, has been exploiting a tax loophole to avoid paying British taxes on her dividend income of $15 million a year. All she had to do was declare that she didn’t intend to stay in the UK permanently - which may be true, because it then came out that Rishi and she had both kept their US-issued green cards. That ends Sunak’s prime ministerial ambitions - and then there’s the ‘bully who sends immigrants to Rwanda’, Home Secretary Priti Patel. She announced the plan last week while handing a £120 million down payment to Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame for taking asylum seekers off Britain’s hands. It’s probably illegal, and Patel doubtless realises that it won’t ever really happen. She’s just throwing some red meat to the racist and anti-immigrant voters who played a big part in putting Johnson & Co. into power in the last election. But she hasn’t solved the bigger problem, which is what to do about Johnson. Nobody has. Johnson’s popularity in the party and in the country has collapsed, and even his recent sub-Churchillian posturing in Ukraine has done nothing to restore it. But following the decline of Rishi Sunak’s star, the Conservatives have no other candidate who will tickle the electorate’s fancy.
(Gwynne Dyer’s new book is ‘The Shortest History of War’. The views expressed are personal.)